Chinook and the Ethnologue

[Liland Brajant Ros']

>From: Tom Larsen <bvtl at ODIN.PDX.EDU>
>Reply-To: Tom Larsen <bvtl at ODIN.PDX.EDU>
>To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Subject: Re: Chinook and the Ethnologue
>Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 17:05:42 -0800
>
>Yeah, don't get me wrong.  The Ethnologue is an invaluable resource.
>It's just that some folks seem to take what the Ethnologue says as
>gospel truth, and it just ain't always so.  In many cases (perhaps even
>most cases, I really don't know for sure), it's correct, or about as
>close to correct as one can expect.  In some cases one could nitpick
>about what they say, but what they do say is at least one viable
>interpretation of the facts, so that's probably OK too.  In a few cases,
>such as what they say about Chinook, it's just dead wrong.  And in some
>cases what they say seems to represent what one might call "political
>posturing".  That is to say, they take a position (usually one advocated
>by an SIL member) that no one else (that is to say, no one not connected
>with SIL) would agree with, and they present this as if there were no
>dissenting opinions.  Sometimes these positions seem to be taken more in
>conformity with some local sociopolitical ideology than with actual
>linguistic fact.  And then, of course, there are the cases where no one
>really knows for sure what's going on, so they're basically just
>guessing.  So, like I said, it is an invaluable resource since no one
>else has put together all of this kind of information in one place.  But
>it is, nevertheless, a resource that must be used judiciously.  One
>shouldn't ignore what they say, but one should keep a critical eye out.

lilEnd: I quite agree with what you say here, and I myself should not have
said that it was "not reliable", but "not always reliable". But the errors
and/or biased assessments are numerous enough that it should never be
provided to the public without a bit of a caveat, in my opinion. (Its
treatment of Puget Sound Salish is just about as confused as its Chinook
dialectology.) My sister's a Wycliffe Bible Translator (into Mazatec de San
Jerónimo Tecoatl, so I have some experience with SIL thinking, and while
they have much more information on the languages in which they are
conducting work (or have recently), those are precisely the areas where
their biases (as opposed to errors) are most evident. Sometimes I think some
of it is more a matter of justifying specific personnel's existence than of
linguistics.

lilEnd

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